Vice President Spiro Theodore Agnew, who died ten years ago last month, made history 33 years ago today, when he became the first vice president to resign in disgrace from that office. (John C. Calhoun, the other vice-president who resigned, did so in order to assume a seat in the Senate). (来源：www.EnglishCN.com)

There's no contest that Agnew left his mark on the lexicon, although (as befits a politician with a paid speechwriter) there also is no doubt his memorable phrasings did not all originate with him. Agnew's speechwriters are credited with coming up with the alliterative "nattering nabobs of negativism," a vice-presidential description of the press corps (to quote Agnew, a description of that "effete corps of impudent snobs") he went on to label "hopeless, hysterical, hypochondriacs of history."

We're no pusillanimous pussyfooters—we're diving right in to explain just where the words nattering and nabob come from.

To natter is to chatter. That verb, which is believed to be imitative, first appeared in print in 1942. Nabob, which Agnew used in its sense "naming a person of great wealth or prominence," is far older than natter. It first appeared in English in 1612 as a name for a provincial governor of the Mogul tribe in India. Nabob's path into English was downright multicultural: it entered English from Hindi and Urdu but comes ultimately from na-ib, the Arabic word for governor.